[laumars]

The abbreviation convention on networking gear isn’t a good thing. It allows for typos to become completely different command, thus introducing unexpected behaviour. I’ve heard so many horror stories (and had some of my own too) because of this.

[gerdesj]

I don't agree with you. It is a convenience but you do need to be careful. There are few (if any) commands that can be morphed into another to cause horror. All switch command completers I know of will not complete on ambiguity.

If you feel you are personally a bit random then use the try/commit mode that most decent gear allows. You package up a set of changes and try them out. You then commit them within an agreed time or the changes revert.

[laumars]

As I said, I’ve personally been bit by feature and know of others who have. So I’m not talking about a theoretical risk.

Things might have improved since I was last managing Cisco gear. try/commit wasn’t available back then and maybe those stupid commands (like “administrator-full-port-shutdown”) have been since removed to prevent ambiguous shortenings. But I did quickly learn that it’s better to be explicit rather than implicit. And frankly, I still think that’s good advice given the IaC methodologies that are now commonly practiced. If nothing else, you should be writing your config so that others can read it, and storing that config in version control.